I know that cat’s just joking, but I really did have to spreadsheet my cats’ food amounts based on calories per brand so I wasn’t overfeeding them when I bought different food.

You’re welcome! I had a personal experience with this, too.

When I was a kid, my parents used to make me go to church and youth group stuff. We went to one of those “hip” events at Carowinds (like a Six Flags, Disney type amusement park). Before it started our youth leader said - to his credit - “No matter what you feel, DO NOT go down to the front when they call people up.”

Sure enough towards the end, I start feeling “the spirit”, and I’m the most skeptical, atheist/agnostic in the whole group. But I stayed in my seat. And when we got back to the hotel I was thinking “what the hell happened there?”

I’m back! I couldn’t find the specific thing I read, but I found something probably better, an actual study published in Pubmed:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8871314/

Statistical analyses showed that the psychological disposition during the religious worship experience speeds up the physiological responses, which was indicated by increases in HR [hear rate] and RR [respiratory rate]. Hence, the activation hypothesis was accepted, and the pacification hypothesis was rejected.

I’ll try to look for it. It was a loooong time ago though.

I read an article years ago that explained why so many people get “religious” feelings at big revival-type events at Six Flags, Carowinds, etc, even if they’re not particularly devout.

There’s a thing called respiratory alkalosis (essentially hyperventilation) which makes you light-headed and confused. At it’s really easy to trigger by making people stand up quickly, sing really hard, sit back down, stand up and cheer, etc.

I’ve been trying to think of a good metaphor, but I haven’t landed on one yet. The best thing I’ve thought of is the old saying:

Whereever you are, you’re here.

Federation (for lemmy) is the concept of the different instances sharing sublemmys, posts, and comments with each other. So you can be on any instance and interact or subscribe with things from another.

The strong caveat is: some instances turn off federation with others. For example, Beehaw has stronger moderation, and they had problems with users and spam from a specific other instance (lemmy.world was one, I think). So in that case, Beehaw turned off federation with lemmy.world. That means that if you were logged in to Beehaw, you would not see any new content from lemmy.world until they turned federation back on.

edit: I thought of one more thing. For communities that are run by their developers, like Minecraft, Lemmy is a great solution. They could host their own Lemmy instance (lemmy.minecraft) and lock down so that only their sublemmy - /c/Minecraft - is created. But when they federate, they get all the other content from other Lemmy instances.

• As a user, you could sign up with lemmy.minecraft or lemm.ee, etc., and still see everything you want and sub to the /c/Minecraft.

• As mods/admins, they only need to focus on their Minecraft thing. And they have complete control over that, because they can literally shut down the entire instance.

lied about almost literally every achievement in his life – university, multiple years of work experience, etc

I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s funny how common it is for these people to also be complete liars about what they’ve accomplished in life.

Is it too much to ask to be an honest racist nowadays? Don’t make me argue with you about racism and lying. That’s just annoying.

In the article at least, De Santis hasn’t explained how that works for the “good” Americans he wants to keep. Is every infant just not a citizen anymore until they can pass the test?

Don’t even try to think about the downstream affects of that on healthcare and education.

Some of them don’t even know how amendments work. They think the 2nd amendment was passed down by God on stone tablets.

I’ve argued with a person that didn’t know amendments could change other amendments. Nor did he know how amendments were voted on. But he swore the amendments were perfect when written and couldn’t possibly be changed.

I don’t know, I think even in real life people get silly when discussing topics they have strong feelings about, and politics seems to be one of them fairly often.

I saw an economic’s professor start an argument in a coffee shop about Bernie Sanders. And he legitimately said something about Sanders’s socialism leading to firing squads.

Getting into an argument like that isn’t even worth it or possible to win.

And the window of correct opinion keeps getting narrower. Any time there’s a chance to gatekeep morality, someone out there wants to prove they’re the most <whatever>.

On any of the popular subs, no one’s going to read your comment in good faith. They’ll see what they wanted you to say and just reply to that.

As some of the article’s comments say, the answer is probably the simplest: IBM.

IBM said they’d let Red Hat operate independently, but it was a matter of time before some of that corporate “culture” (aka stock-driven decisions) started showing through.

Hopefully the employees themselves aren’t slowly sinking into the IBM workload. I think a lot of them intentionally left IBM for Red Hat specifically because of the ideological difference.

Jamb bands

The Doors are the only jamb band I can think of.

The one bright side of this article is that it’s coming from The New Republic, which is traditionally more conservative. And the author is calling out how sad this plan is.

edit: I’m wrong? This never happens! see reply below.